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Overview

This classic samurai-era text fused Japanese swordsmanship with Zen and influenced the direction that the art has taken ever since. Written by the seventeenth-century Zen master Takuan Soho (1573–1645), The Unfettered Mind is a book of advice on swordsmanship and the cultivation of right mind and intention. It was written as a guide for the samurai Yagyu Munenori, who was a great swordsman and rival to the legendary Miyamoto Musashi.

Takuan was a giant in the history of Zen; he was also a gardener, calligrapher, poet, author, adviser to samurai and shoguns, and a pivotal figure in Zen painting. He was known for his brilliance and acerbic wit. In these succinct and pointed essays, Takuan is concerned primarily with understanding and refining the mind—both generally and when faced with conflict. The Unfettered Mind was a major influence on the classic manifestos on swordsmanship that came after it, including Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings and Yagyu Munenori's Life-Giving Sword.

Product Details

About the Author

William Scott Wilson is the foremost translator into English of traditional Japanese texts on samurai culture. He received BA degrees from Dartmouth College and the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies, and an MA in Japanese literary studies from the University of Washington. His best-selling books include The Book of Five Rings, The Unfettered Mind, and The Lone Samurai, a biography of Miyamoto Musashi.

Read an Excerpt

The Affliction of Abiding in IgnoranceThe term ignorance
means the absence of enlightenment. Which is to say, delusion.
Abiding place means the place where the mind stops.
In the practice of Buddhism, there are said to be fifty-two stages, and
within these fifty-two, the place where the mind stops at one thing is
called the abiding place. Abiding signifies stopping, and stopping means the
mind is being detained by some matter, which may be any matter at all.
To speak in terms of your own martial art, when you first notice the
sword that is moving to strike you, if you think of meeting that sword just
as it is, your mind will stop at the sword in just that position, your own
movements will be undone, and you will be cut down by your opponent. This is
what stopping means.
Although you see the sword that moves to strike you, if your mind is not
detained by it and you meet the rhythm of the advancing sword; if you do not
think of striking your opponent and no thoughts or judgments remain; if the
instant you see the swinging sword your mind is not the least bit detained
and you move straight in and wrench the sword away from him; the sword that
was going to cut you down will become your own, and, contrarily, will be the
sword that cuts down your opponent.
In Zen this is called "Grabbing the spear and, contrariwise, piercing
the man who had come to pierce you." The spear is a weapon. The heart of
this is that the sword you wrest from your adversary becomes the sword that
cuts him down. This is what you, in your style, call "No-Sword."
Whether by the strike of the enemy or your own thrust, whether by the
man who strikes or the sword that strikes, whether by position or rhythm, if
your mind is diverted in any way, your actions will falter, and this can
mean that you will be cut down.
If you place yourself before your opponent, your mind will be taken by
him. You should not place your mind within yourself. Bracing the mind in the
body is something done only at the inception of training, when one is a
beginner.
The mind can be taken by the sword. If you put your mind in the rhythm
of the contest, your mind can be taken by that as well. If you place your
mind in your own sword, your mind can be taken by your own sword. Your mind
stopping at any of these places, you become an empty shell. You surely
recall such situations yourself. They can be said to apply to Buddhism.
In Buddhism, we call this stopping of the mind delusion. Thus we say,
"The affliction of abiding in ignorance."

The Immovable Wisdom of all Buddhas
Immovable means unmoving.

Wisdom means the wisdom of intelligence.
Although wisdom is called immovable, this does not signify any
insentient thing, like wood or stone. It moves as the mind is wont to move:
forward or back, to the left, to the right, in the ten directions and to the
eight points; and the mind that does not stop at all is called immovable
wisdom.
Fudo Myoo grasps a sword in his right hand and holds a rope in his left
hand. He bares his teeth and his eyes flash with anger. His form stands
firmly, ready to defeat the evil spirits that would obstruct the Buddhist
Law. This is not hidden in any country anywhere. His form is made in the
shape of a protector of Buddhism, while his embodiment is that of immovable
wisdom. This is what is shown to living things.
Seeing this form, the ordinary man becomes afraid and has no thoughts of
becoming an enemy of Buddhism. The man who is close to enlightenment
understands that this manifests immovable wisdom and clears away all
delusion. For the man who can make his immovable wisdom apparent and who is
able to physically practice this mental dharma as well as Fudo Myoo, the
evil spirits will no longer proliferate. This is the purpose of Fudo Myoo's
tidings.
What is called Fudo Myoo is said to be one's unmoving mind and an
unvacillating body. Unvacillating means not being detained by anything.
Glancing at something and not stopping the mind is called immovable.
This is because when the mind stops at something, as the breast is filled
with various judgments, there are various movements within it. When its
movements cease, the stopping mind moves, but does not move at all.
If ten men, each with a sword, come at you with swords slashing, if you
parry each sword without stopping the mind at each action, and go from one
to the next, you will not be lacking in a proper action for every one of the
ten.
Although the mind act ten times against ten men, if it does not halt at
even one of them and you react to one after another, will proper action be
lacking?....

Table of Contents

Foreword

15

Introduction

19

The Mysterions Record of Immovable Wisdom

27

The Clear Sound of Jewels

67

Annals of the Sword Taia

111

Notes

132

Bibliography

142

Introduction

Takuan Soho was Zen monk, calligrapher, painter, poet, gardener, tea
master, and, perhaps, inventor of the pickle that even today retains his
name. His writings were prodigious (the collected works fill six volumes),
and are a source of guidance and inspiration to the Japanese people today,
as they have been for three and a half centuries. Adviser and confidant to
high and low, he seems to have moved freely through almost every stratum of
society, instructing both shogun and emperor and, as legend has it, being
friend and teacher to the swordsman/artist, Miyamoto Musashi. He seems to
have remained unaffected by his fame and popularity, and at the approach of
death he instructed his disciples, "Bury my body in the mountain behind the
temple, cover it with dirt and go home. Read no sutras, hold no ceremony.
Receive no gifts from either monk or laity. Let the monks wear their robes,
eat their meals, and carry on as on normal days." At his final moment, he
wrote the Chinese character for yume ("dream"), put down the brush, and
died.

Takuan was born in 1573 in the village of Izushi in the province of
Tajima, an area of deep snows and mountain mists. Izushi is a village
ancient enough to be mentioned in both of the early histories of Japan, the
Kojiki (A.D. 712) and the Nihon-gi (A.D. 720), and the countryside around it
is sprinkled with relics of earlier ages, as well as ancient burial mounds
and pottery shards of extreme antiquity. Although born into a samurai family
of the Miura clan at the culmination of 150 years of civil strife, Takuan
entered a monastery at the age of ten to study the Jodo sect of Buddhism,
moving on to practice the Rinzai sect of Zen at the age of fourteen and
becoming the abbot of the Daitokuji, a major Zen temple in Kyoto, at the
unprecedented age of thirty-five.

In 1629, Takuan became involved in what was referred to as the "Purple
Robe Affair," in which he opposed the shogunate's decision to cancel the
emperor's power to make appointments to high ecclesiastical ranks and
offices. For his opposition, he was banished to what is now Yamagata
Prefecture, and it was in this far northern hinterland where the first and
the last of the three essays in this volume were written. He was included in
the general amnesty upon the shogun's death, and returned to Kyoto in 1632.
During the following years he befriended and taught Zen to the abdicated but
very influential emperor, Go-Mizunoo, and so impressed the new shogun,
Tokugawa Iemitsu, who constantly sought his friendship, that he founded the
Tokaiji in 1638 at the shogun's behest. And, while friendly to both shogun
and emperor, he adamantly steered clear of the political quarrels that so
often embroiled the shogunate and the chrysanthemum throne.

To the end, Takuan is said to have followed his own independent,
eccentric and sometimes bitter way. His strength and angularity are apparent
in his calligraphy and painting as well as in the following essays, and it
is interesting that we can, perhaps, have a taste of the man's character by
simply sampling a dish of takuanzuke, a pickle made from the giant Japanese
radish.

His life may be summed up by his own admonition, "If you follow the
present-day world, you will turn your back on the Way; if you would not turn
your back on the Way, do not follow the world."

It is said that Takuan sought to infuse the spirit of Zen into every
aspect of life that caught his interest, such things as calligraphy, poetry,
gardening and the arts in general. This he also did with the art of the
sword. Living during the last days of the violent feudal strife which
culminated, essentially, with the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Takuan was
acquainted not only with the peace and sublimity of the artist and tea
master, but also with the confrontation--victory and defeat--of the warrior
and general. Among the latter were such disparate figures as Ishida
Mitsunari, a powerful general who supported Toyotomi Hideyoshi; Kuroda
Nagamasa, a Christian daimyo who engineered Mitsunari's downfall; and,
especially, his friend Yagyu Munenori, head of the Yagyu Shinkage school of
swordsmanship and teacher to two generations of shoguns. To these men and
these times, Takuan addressed himself no less than to others.

Of the three essays included in this translation, two were letters:
Fudochishinmyoroku, "The Mysterious Record of Immovable Wisdom," written to
Yagyu Munenori; and Taiaki, "Annals of the Sword Taia," written perhaps to
Munenori or possibly to Ono Tadaaki, head of the Itto school of
swordsmanship and also an official instructor to the shogun's family and
close retainers. The circumstances of how they came to be written are
unclear, although the frank advice and rather Confucian admonishment to
Munenori at the end of Fudochishinmyoroku adds another interesting if
somewhat puzzling dimension to this work.

As a whole, all three are addressed to the samurai class, and all three
seek to unify the spirit of Zen with the spirit of the sword. The advice
given is a blend of the practical, technical and philosophical aspects of
confrontation. Individually and broadly speaking, one could say that
Fudochishinmyoroku deals not only with technique, but with how the self is
related to the Self during confrontation and how an individual may become a
unified whole. Taiaki, on the other hand, deals more with the psychological
aspects of the relationship between the self and the other. Between these,
Reiroshu, "The Clear Sound of Jewels," deals with the fundamental nature of
the human being, with how a swordsman, daimyo--or any person, for that
matter--can know the difference between what is right and what is mere
selfishness, and can understand the basic question of knowing when and how
to die.

All three essays turn the individual to knowledge of himself, and hence
to the art of life.

Swordsmanship as an expression of technique alone and meditative Zen had
long existed in Japan, Zen having become firmly established around the end
of the twelfth century. With Takuan they achieved a true coalescence, and
his writings and opinions on the sword have been extraordinarily influential
in the direction the art of Japanese swordsmanship has taken from that day
to the present, for it is an art still fervently practiced, and it reflects
a significant spectrum of the Japanese outlook on life. Firmly establishing
the unity of Zen and the sword, they have influenced the writings of the
great masters of the time and produced a spinoff of documents which continue
to be read and applied, such as the Heiho Kadensho of Yagyu Munenori and the
Gorin no Sho of Miyamoto Musashi. The styles of these men differed, but
their conclusions weave together a lofty level of insight and understanding,
whether it be expressed as the "freedom and spontaneity" of Musashi, the
"ordinary mind that knows no rules" of Munenori or the "unfettered mind" of
Takuan.

For Takuan, the culmination was not one of death and destruction, but
rather of enlightenment and salvation. Confrontation, in the "right" mind,
would not only give life, but give it more abundantly.
eie

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

The Unfettered Mind: Writings from a Zen Master to a Master Swordsman 3.7 out of 5based on
0 ratings.
3 reviews.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

I was in way over my head with this book--a Budhist's advice for a warrior. I don't have the background to dive into this book.

FaceMan

More than 1 year ago

A short and wonderful read by Buddhist Takuan Soho, who assisted Musashi and Munenori in Feudal Japan. Great adages by him and very engrossing read. A min Buddhist bible, such as Five Rings and the Art of Peace. Carry them with you and read always.

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